You see this a lot with automatic sentencing and the like. It ends up being a "no common sense" policy that ends up hurting people only tangentially related to the original problem. The better solution is a general ban on use, but allow exceptions for cases where it makes sense.

Is it just me, or is anyone else turned off by products that contain "Earth" or "green"? It just gives me the impression that they're using the term to jack up the price for trendy assholes that flock to such buzzwords.

It's not just you. I actively avoid such products. I assume that they're either lying, or using inferior materials or processes, or charging more for what they use in order to make the claim, otherwise their competitors would be using the same materials and/or processes.

Another thing to avoid is energy star appliances. They take dish washers and clothes dryers, for example, and get them a better rating by taking much longer to clean or dry things [consumerreports.org]. The end result is a product that doesn't work as well. For example, 2-3 hour dishwasher cycles are becoming the norm.

Yes, still too much. Sadly for me (There are traces of milk in damn near everything.) it really doesn't take much for me to lose a nights sleep to lactose intolerance.
Even most Margarines have traces of milk products in them.

For anyone out there who feels my pain, (Literally) I suggest you try Acidophilus pills. They are the only thing I have found that helps me at all.

Play them against each other. Just put the bug in Monsanto's ear your willing to support feeding prisoners a diet of Golden Rice and Water. That should get their lobbyists and knee capers excited; then just sit back and see how it shakes out.

Outright bans are also contrary to the liberal philosophy on which Western civilization is based. Furthermore, prohibition is proven to have some nasty unintended consequences.

I like the approach we take toward smoking: adults can use it if they want, but only with full awareness of the fact that it is suicidal. Require similar labeling on trans fat foods. Don't take away citizens' choices - ensure they are making informed choices.

and the ban of DDT has been linked to more deaths than all modern wards combined.

Only by idiots that don't seem to grasp the point that those deaths are all happening in places where DDT is not banned at all.

Ad hominem fallacy... very clever. I like how you then proceeded to a fact that seemed rational at first, but which is also blatantly wrong. DDT being illegal in the first world severely limited its availability in the third world.

Actually it hasn't. You've just pulled the "making shit up" fallacy on someone that's being paying attention to this subject for several decades so your pointless bluff has failed.

He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with another hunter as to whether a seal pup knew instinctively how to swim. He held that it did, that it could swim the moment it was born. The other hunter, Latimer, a lean, Yankee-looking fellow with shr

The ban on DDT is why almost every hotel and motel in the US has a bedbug problem.

No, American laziness and greed going hand in hand does.You don't see an American scrub, wax or move furniture. It's all about doing things as cheap as possible. Five minutes per room.Add that American bathrooms aren't designed as wet rooms, and you end up with a nice moist environment for both roaches and bed bugs.

We know why it's in foods. It's cheap. It's really cheap. To make sure that choice is clear, labels would need a requirement that any amount is listed... and not allowing the "less that.5 gram" exception that exists today.

Of course, there's a part of me that knows that people won't think about any consequences anyway. I weigh freedom which allows increased public health costs (medicaid, medicare, Social Security Disability, whatever else) of allowing this choice, vs an outright ban that might make that

This is actually reasonably sensible. If the reason that trans fat is used is because it's substantially cheaper than the alternatives then taxing trans fat will cause the free market to eliminate it on its own. I know the idea of manipulating the market in order to achieve a goal is anathema to free market fundamentalists, but it actually really does work. It also allows for appropriate exceptions since, where trans fat isn't being used simply because it's cheap it will still make financial sense to do it.

The issue which arises from these plans is usually cost of compliance, but the compliance cost difference between an outright ban and taxation probably isn't dramatic.

There's other reasons - it acts as a preservative, and is highly variable in it's consistency based on how much hydrogen is added to the vegetable oil. By using more hydrogen, they can make it thicker, so it stays in the product and doesn't leave greasy stains underneath from the oil seeping out.

It's still heinous shit, but these are some of the reasons why it's used.

Actually, it's not. You have to understand why they're used and how not using them would affect the food products which are being sold. Shortly put, a tax on them would not make them less used, but will increase the price of the same crappy food. In the end, people will pay more for the same crap. The only winning entity is the government.

Is it? How do you spearate the effect of the tax from the massive anti-smoking ad campaigns and the fact the folks who would probably be the core demographic otherwise all grew up being subject to anti-tobacco propaganda in public schools almost every day?

Its not like anyone ever tries a scientific approach to these social experiments and tries just one variable. Consider gas taxes, if taxes alone we good drivers of consumer demand why were CAFE standards enacted? Should not the existence of a gas tax cr

Your body has facilities in it to process burning plant matter. To remove a lot of what it does. It is stupid to do it but our evolution does give us some protection against it. However we don't have adaptations to deal with those modern trans-fats. I am only talking about the artificial ones, not the natural ones. We have enzymes designed to break trans-fat linkages at specific points in a chain, they ONLY work at those specific points. So natural trans-fats we don't have a problem with. The artificial ones would be okay if they had their cross links at the same location but they don't. As a result we can't process them correctly and that leads to a lot of problems.

This is not in any way like smoking. Good on the FDA for regulating them.

Outright bans are also contrary to the liberal philosophy on which Western civilization is based. Furthermore, prohibition is proven to have some nasty unintended consequences.

I like the approach we take toward smoking: adults can use it if they want, but only with full awareness of the fact that it is suicidal. Require similar labeling on trans fat foods. Don't take away citizens' choices - ensure they are making informed choices.

Out of curiosity, what is your stance on banning the use of diethylene glycol [wikipedia.org] as a cheaper substitute for glycerin as a humecant and sweetener in foods?

(Bart tries to seek help from a French policeman after he is sent into town by Cesar and Ugolin, and he walks away dejected, because he couldn't communicate in French with the policeman.)

Bart: I'm so stupid. Anybody could have learned this dumb language by now. Here I've listened to nothing but French for the past (Speaking French) two months and I haven't learned a word. Wait! I'm talking French now. Incredible!

Food producers were given ample opportunity to reduce trans fats. I don't know if they've threatened the outright ban already, but I doubt this is a big surprise to major food corps.

It seems that they're targeting fast food and frozen food products. I don't know that a ban is a great thing. A stronger push to reduce would probably be better.

Banning foods that aren't good for you is a slippery slope, and wen it impacts particular food stuffs, the people will get very upset. You can use the New York soft drink ban as an example. It was voted upon ont Sept 13, 2012. It was invalidated by the New York Supreme Court on Mar 11, 2013.

The government should not be deciding if a food is good or bad for you. The exception is carcinogenic foodstuffs that you may not be aware of (like red dye #2 and #4 and orange dye #1).

Honestly, they have bigger issues that they could be addressing like "meat glue", "pink slime", false label "honey" and "maple syrup", and fish that could be anything but what the package says.

Actually, I'd love to see them enforce what the package says or implies is actually true of the product. If the front of the package says "all natural" with a tiny asterisk, but the back of the package has a microprint line that says "may contain up to 10% real [product]" or "may contain arsenic and/or cyanide", really isn't doing anyone any good.

And fucking hell, I want "Pringles Light potato crisps" to have in big bold words across the front "Contains Olestra! You may shit your pants while eating this!" Mmmm.. Can't eat just one, eh?

Honestly, they have bigger issues that they could be addressing like "meat glue", "pink slime", false label "honey" and "maple syrup", and fish that could be anything but what the package says.

I hate reading this. Look pink slime, while not a name that makes you salivate is a perfectly good product. You don't need to be putting the best cuts of meat into something like a frozen burrito but it is nice to have some real meat in it. Pink Slime is perfectly safe healthy meat protein at very low cost. It may very likely be even safer in terms of resistance to contamination than the rest of the meat to leave the processing plant. Pink Slime is very much still beef, its not a false label. Just bec

I don't disagree with that. It's a food stuff. If I want cut rate meat filled, great. The FDA is still allowing up to 15% pink slime without additional labeling.

My complaint is, what I buy should be what it says it is. Should old re-labeled meat treated with carbon monoxide still be sold? I've bought good looking meat, but when I got it home and opened the package it was clearly bad.

When I buy a chicken or turkey, is it really fair to pay extra because they injected saline, increasing the weight by 15%

Odd. Last time I checked a lot of substances were outlawed, to possess, to produce, to ship, to manufacture, etc.

Most of them are either dangerous to life by their very nature (like certain chemicals that go boom if you don't know what you're doing) or because eating, drinking, snorting, injecting or otherwise pushing them into your body is either directly or indirectly harmful. Trans fat belongs in that second category.

That will make perfect sense IF the manufacturers would care to foot the bill for the excess medical costs. To date, I figure they owe about 84 billion in medical costs for heart attacks. There'll be more liabilities for the half million wrongful deaths and for whatever medical interventions were necessary but not accounted for by heart attacks.

I don't like outright bans with licensed exceptions. that's idiotic. The other extreme is hoping that "market forces" or unicorns or other things magically manage to regulate this.

What is needed is an informed and sympathetic consumer and regulation of excesses. Especially the first bit is not easy to achieve but it is the right thing to do. Same thing should be done with sugary stuff.

How about we tell everybody that their favourite brand of coke contains some salt so they feel the need to drink more of

Note that this isn't ALL trans fats, only synthetic trans fats made by hydrogenating vegetable oils. Naturally occurring trans fats that are present in lard, for example, are not going to be banned. I don't buy the sort of heavily processed products that include hydrogenated vegetable oils anyway, so I anticipate this change having no effect on me at all. But it might improve the health of people who live on processed foods and lower my insurance costs.

Are you sure, since I've seen foods that say 0% trans fats on the box, but list hydrogenated oils in their ingredients. And even the ingredients list can omit an ingredient if the quantity is low enough.

That's disingenuous and you know it. Ingesting trans fat rarely is a choice; given the possibility to take trans fat and non-trans fat food (and assuming they know the implications of trans fat), I don't think anyone would pick the first option. The reasons for consuming trans fat are usually money and ignorance, not "lifestyle", and banning trans fat is pretty much the best way to stop it from causing trouble in this scenario. If handled properly it should have a minimal impact on food prices.

Remember, this isn't about banning meat or something. It's about banning something which only has an upside for the manufacturer.

But minimal is not none, and the folks near the bottom as you say don't have lots of choices. You and I might have the flexibility to just absorb some small cost increases or adjust or allocations but people near the bottom often don't as you say.

Its also not just transfat its everything everywhere, rather than buying an inefficient incandescent light for a $1 and paying for it slowly over its life time in increased energy costs, people now have to shell out $10 to get a bulb. If $10 is still a meaningfu

There is hardly anything that isn't poisonous when taken in excess, oxygen and water included. Calling moderately consumed trans-fats "poison" is misleading at best, and dishonest when evaluated fairly.

The one thing that the left and right appear to agree on in the US is that most of the population is too stupid to survive without their lives being micromanaged by the state. The predominant difference seems to be that they disagree on whether a cull is a good idea...

With something as damaging as hydrogenated oils, I have no problem with a ban. This isn't like cigarettes, where you're buying the dangerous item directly. Hydrogenated oils are snuck in to foods, and the companies try to avoid labelling. Plus they taste like shit. Who are you defending, anyway? Who the fuck *wants* trans fats in their food?

There are some naturally occurring tranfs-fats that our bodies have enzymes to deal wit (like in milk) and those are no problem at all. The problem is with the artificial trans-fats. The issue is when there is a trans link where your body does not have an enzyme that can break that link. It leads to strange problems like malformed cholesterol (which you need to live) and ends up causing things like arterial damage and plaques.

I do agree with the FDA dealing with foods that our bodies just can not process. This is not like alcohol where too much causes damage, our bodies can deal with smaller amounts of alcohol just fine and break it down. Some of these trans-fats we just have no natural way to break them down at all. As such they get stuck in places, have to be removed by other processes that don't always work, sometimes get incorporated into other things incorrectly etc.

However it looks like the FDA is making the right choice. They seem to only be going after the types of trans-fats that our bodies can't process.

I only know it from class which means that it could be wrong. However my professors emphasized that we have special enzymes designed to change a trans to cis linkage but only at certain locations. That is just due to the size of these molecules and what our enzymes can do. If a trans connection is somewhere else then the enzyme does not fit right and doesn't break it. However since those lipids can still be broken on their other cis links they can be broken up small enough that an enzyme to put them into a

When you ban something, something else will inevitably replace it, and it may end up being worse than what you banned. What I've noticed is that when "partially hydrogenated" (i.e. trans-fats) vanishes from ingredients lists, it's usually replaced by "TBHQ", which is a preservative used to prevent fats from oxidizing. Partially hydrogenated fats are less prone to oxidizing, so when you remove that option they have to replace it with something else, and TBHQ seems to be the cheapest option.

The problem is that TBHQ has its own down sides. Five grams of it is allegedly lethal, and some people can't tolerate even small amounts of it. I am one of them. When I eat even a small amount of food with TBHQ in it, I get panic attacks or worse. In one case my pulse went up to around 240. Since then I've had to be very careful to avoid anything with TBHQ in it, but all these anti-trans-fat extremists pushing regulations for my health don't take into account that they may be killing me by taking away the foods I can eat without winding up in an emergency room.

In short, people know their own situation better than central planners do, and they may have personal issues that make the lack of trans-fats even worse than the presence of trans-fats. Regulating them institutes a form of tyranny of the majority. [wikipedia.org] It's analogous to forcing someone with a peanut allergy to eat peanuts because they're so nutritious and because most people aren't allergic. Don't do that. Instead, just label foods accurately and let people make their own decisions.

+1 interesting. The reasons for the widespread use of hydrogenated oils aren't going to vanish because we ban trans-fats. Without an alternative, all the cookies and other processed preserved things we love will vanish. So in that scenario either people must choose to pay more and go to the resurgent local baker's every day, or else choose to go without (I chose this years ago). A simple minded ban on one small facet of the issue isn't going to help anything. It's like putting a rock in the middle of a rive

Once upon a time in America [wikipedia.org] (and Canada [wikipedia.org] even more recently), margarine was outlawed. Or at least margarine colored yellow to look like butter looks when butter is colored yellow. Some states required no coloring, and there were places that margarine was required to be colored an unappetizing color like pink or blue. There were various work-arounds, including selling uncolored margarine with coloring included. Some pretty ingenious packaging resulted to simplify the process of coloring it at home.

Although my opinion lies most closely to requiring clear labels, I firmly believe that rather than banning it, there should simply be a hefty tax imposed on it by weight, so that foods which contain it will tend to cost more.

People who would not be able to afford the tax would then tend to eat healthier, which would be the same outcome as if there were actually a ban in place, while the actual freedom to choose is not entirely removed from consumers.

As a side effect, the tax can be used as a revenue stream to subsidize the costs of enforcing mandatory labeling on all applicable products.

I'd rather have to pay a higher price for something I might want than not have the freedom to choose it in the first place.

The US nuclear power industry opposed change and thus ate their own children (eg. lobbying to shut down the thorium projects and some reprocessing experiments). The current state of the US nuclear industry is almost entirely self inflicted - the only others you could blame are investors that are unwilling to put money into something with such a low rate of return.China, India and even South Africa have progressed much more with civilian nuclear power than